Joseph Brennemann was born on September 25, 1872 near Peru, Illinois, the second of at least five sons of Joseph and Mary (Schaefer) Brennemann. His father had come to the United States from Germany; his mother was born in Ohio of German parents.
Growing up on his father's farm, Brennemann was educated in country schools and at the University of Michigan, from which he graduated with the Ph. B. degree in 1895.
After teaching school for a year, he enrolled in the medical school of Northwestern University, but interrupted his studies to be with a sick brother in Texas, where he again taught school. He spent his third year of medical study at Gross Medical College in Denver, Colorado, and then returned to Northwestern, receiving the M. D. degree in 1900.
By 1910 he had decided to make pediatrics his specialty, and that year he went for postgraduate training to Germany and Austria.
After two years working as an intern at St. Luke's Hospital in Chicago, Brennemann established a general practice on Chicago's South Side, where he associated himself with a number of charitable medical clinics.
On his return from postgraduate training in Germany and Austria to Chicago he became attending physician to the pediatric departments of St. Luke's Hospital and the Wesley Memorial Hospital. Always greatly interested in dispensary work, in 1915 he also became attending physician in the outpatient department of the Northwestern Dispensary.
Along with his private practice and hospital appointments, Brennemann taught pediatrics to junior medical students at Northwestern, where he served on the medical faculty as instructor (1903), clinical assistant (1904), associate (1907), assistant professor (1908), and associate professor (1918).
In 1921 Frank Billings, dean of Rush Medical College of the University of Chicago, selected Brennemann for the post of chief of staff at the Children's Memorial Hospital of Chicago, and Brennemann, overcoming self-doubt, accepted. At the same time he became professor of pediatrics at Rush and at the University of Chicago School of Medicine. Since these posts brought no income, he continued his pediatric practice until 1930, when he was given a full-time salaried appointment.
Brennemann retired from the Children's Memorial Hospital and the University of Chicago in 1941. He spent the next two years as chief of staff at the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles and as professor and head of the department of pediatrics at the University of Southern California.
Although he then retired to his country home in Reading, Vermont, he remained active, serving as visiting pediatrician to the Milwaukee Children's Hospital during the month of April 1944. That July, back in Reading, he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of seventy-one.
Brennemann contributed many papers and was active in the Section on Pediatrics of the American Medical Association and in the American Pediatric Society (of which he was president in 1929-30). Among the more important were "A Contribution to Our Knowledge of the Etiology and Nature of Hard Curds in Infants' Stools" (American Journal of Diseases of Children, May 1911), which settled a long-standing controversy on the subject among physicians, and "Rheumatism in Children" (Illinois Medical Journal, July 1914), a major contribution to the subject of rheumatism and rheumatic heart disease. Perhaps his greatest achievement was his work as editor of The Practice of Pediatrics (1936), published in four loose-leaf volumes to permit continuous revision. He wrote many sections himself, solicited the others from a variety of contributors, and edited them painstakingly.
Brennemann was a popular teacher. He spoke clearly, simply, and philosophically, conveying dramatically the highlights of pediatric practice. He was an avid reader with broad intellectual curiosity and was noted for his independence of thought. In the practice of pediatrics he exerted a leavening influence for conservatism, urging a common-sense approach, a wariness of faddism, and a greater reliance on the child's natural defenses against infection. A clinician to the last, he was studying his own electrocardiogram with his attending physician at the moment of death.
Brennemann was a member of the American Medical Association and in the American Pediatric Society.
Brennemann combined gentleness of manner with a fine sense of humor that endeared him to children and parents, as well as to medical students and colleagues.
On January 2, 1903, Joseph Brennemann married Bessie Darling Daniels of Chicago. They had three daughters: Mary Elizabeth, Barbara, and Deborah Ann.
